#heck all the s11 amara episodes but probably mostly

[mittensmorgul]

Hi, I was rewatching the spooky Bobby and Rufus episode from season 11, and I remember at the time people were convinced that this was the first appearance of The Empty, because at the time it had only been mentioned by Billie as a threat to Sam. I was wondering if that’s still the case, if that soul eaters Nest was in the empty? Because it would sort of make sense?

Hi there! and yeah, they did show us the Soul Eater’s nest during the season the concept of the Empty was first really introduced (in 11.02, by Billie threatening Sam with that fate, written by Andrew Dabb). At the time, we had no idea what the Empty would be like, and assumed it was exactly as Billie described it-- as complete annihilation.

I... personally didn’t think of the Soul Eater’s nest as a small version of the Empty, but perhaps a parallel or metaphorical comparison, at best. I was personally still convinced that the Empty would actually be more like what Amara described happened to the souls she “consumed” that would become “boundless within her” in a state of bliss. Combined with Billie’s threat to Sam that she would scatter his molecules so that he could never be brought back.

I was hoping for a version of the Empty that would be the “nothingness” version of Chuck’s heaven and hell-- basically the afterlife corresponding to the universal force of darkness the way Chuck’s creation corresponds to the universal force of light. I was hoping it would be a state of dissolution, rather than a place where consciousness could exist.

I think the closest a Soul Eater’s nest came to being what I had thought of as The Empty at that time was what happened to the souls trapped there when the Soul Eater had finished consuming them. Yes, its nest existed “outside of space and time,” and I do associate those characteristics with the Empty. But at the time the episode aired, before we understood the reality of the Empty, I thought of the Soul Eater Nest as more... “the Empty’s waiting room” than “the Empty itself.” If that makes sense?

Granted, when they finally did choose to show us the Empty on screen in s13, it ended up being quite different than we were expecting, and I have since wondered if they didn’t afterthought the original concept of the Empty into something more on par with the Soul Eater’s nest when they needed to stage scenes there. I mean, like I’ve argued over how Heaven has been presented in canon being the result of “they need to film in three dimensional space and therefore had to use visual shorthand to cover the described reality of Heaven, which is why we ended up with sterile white hallways instead of a maze of Dean’s perception of “open roads” for the Axis Mundi, and why all the “Surly Bobbies” appeared in that white hallway rather than how the Axis Mundi may have appeared to each of them that may have been entirely perceptually different.” They needed to film ~something~ that may have been implied to be... non-Euclidean space... but had to settle on thematic visual shorthand due to the limits of the human condition... if that makes sense >.>

So, yeah, I think if anything, the Empty fell into that category, and even the eventual presentation of it ended up quite different to the Soul Eater nest, which was also outside of time and space, but also necessarily tethered to a fixed location on Earth (the house where it collected its victims).

Lol, I love thinking about this sort of stuff :’D

[elizabethrobertajones]

Hey you, during the course of this season i Have seen more and more people leave the fandom or grow disinterested in spn, and im confused why that it. I get why maybe s12 wouldnt be a fave season but if I look at the wank and bads of the previous ones (destiel fiasco in/out the show s9, charlies death Dean cruelty to Cas in s10, Dean/baby love interest s11) s12 didnt really do much that would drive people away en masse I feel? Yet it seems like more people left it :(

Heya! :D

Idk, maybe it was that more vocal people drifted off? I always feel like people’s attention spans are usually only a few years or so. I mean, I feel like I’ve been in the fandom a Long Time and I’ve only been here since the end of season 9, so really this is only my 3rd hiatus, and coming up to 4th year watching with fandom, on a 12 year show I’ve been watching for nearly 10 years, for the most part as a moderately casual viewer… I think I clock up about 5 years major interest and then drift, based on me vs several other things like how invested I was in LotR or Harry Potter or Animorphs, or whatever (to go back in time to my pre-teen interests :P) and it’s not a bad thing and I still love 2 of those franchises and have engagement in them but back to being a casual fan (if “religiously watches LotR at Christmas” is casual allowing for cultural/social stuff, but I’m not composing Legolas/Aragon smut in my teenage journal in secret code any more :P) 

Anyway the season 8 bubble of fandom could be deflating about now - that’s long enough for people to feel they’ve given the show their full attention and it’s still going so it’s getting tiring. That’s the major feeling I get - people are exhausted and we had a baby boomer fandom around season 8 so that ~generation~ of fans is now reaching the natural end of its attention span in a very human natural way. But there’s a ton of new or newer fans who are still enjoying the heck out of it, and the fandom’s still huge and full of people with a commitment to the show or ships. And some people don’t work like that and are loyal from start to finish or commit to TV shows fully to see them to their end. I would dump a show I was getting bored of but come back to watch the end later in a big marathon to find out what happened, but Supernatural hasn’t given me a reason to get totally un-invested until that time… I suspect a lot of people will watch the entire show ONE DAY but don’t want to do fandom and give it all their leisure time any more either.

[under a cut for meandering rambling]

But yeah I think you’ve named some pretty big mass exodus moments (I would like to clarify “Dean/baby” is “Dean/Amara-as-an-infant” right? Because Dean/Baby totally was a thing in 11x04 and it was GLORIOUS :P) and I feel like I DID lose people from my dash all through the time I’ve been watching. Heck, I hit up fandom right after 9x18, and started following people, and that was the JIB of “we don’t play it that way” so I immediately was following several abandoned blogs and I’d barely even started to get to know the landscape :P I feel like people HAVE been jumping ship the entire time and I remember most of those instances as sadly clearing several favourite people off my dash or turning them into different fandom blogs that I eventually unfollowed out of confusion… 

I don’t know, I think people leave when they want to leave because as long as you like the core of a thing and it holds your interest, you can forgive or ignore or scowl at but hold out for better the bad bits and problematic parts. I’m sort of weary of them killing all the women and PoC but I’m still at the stage where I identify it sucks, but I still care too much about the main characters that I’m sort of stuck on this ride with them. 

(I have 2x21 paused on the screen next to me right as Sam meets all the special children, aka introducing Lily the lesbian who dies horribly as a disposable red shirt to show how awful this situation is, and Jake, a black guy whose power is being super strong and to fall to Azazel’s manipulation, kill Sam, and then get killed with extreme overkill by Sam. In the same season he set the cops on Gordon, also a black man who was really aggro and cruel, but in the next season becomes a monster and Sam kills him also one of the most brutal kills he has up there with Jake. Basically, the show’s always had some issues and if we carried on watching all the way to season 12, well, apply self-reflection, but at this point if you’ve been watching as long as I have, you just kind of accept the show sucks at certain things, and for ME personally it’s not kicking off the sort of weariness that others felt about Billie and Alicia and Eileen being killed off this season)

… I don’t really have a point, expect about the demographics of fandom during season 8 getting to the end of their interest now. I don’t think EVERYONE who did will leave, and we’re getting fresh blood all the time, but I think that’s just part of the nature of being in fandom. I don’t think season 12 is particularly bad from my experience, although some pretty high profile bloggers have gotten exhausted - again, they’ve been maintaining blogs and producing content since single digit seasons so they’ve contributed a LOT to the fandom and there’s a fatigue about contribution as well… 

That’s partially why I meta and gif and write fic and occasionally make random shitposts… I don’t want to burn out because any one of those things on its own can get pretty boring, even writing fic. Or especially, idk, as a writer I tend to bounce around projects, so this is keeping me weirdly focused on writing my original fiction on one side of my brain and fan fic on the other and it seems to be a better way of splitting my attention… But I digress. :P 

I know how to manage my own brain to some degree but I have a lot of time to contemplate and self-reflect on why I’m in fandom and what I get out of it, and mostly I just conclude I’m bored and house-bound and I’ve found a few tried and tested things that get me some positive attention in a non-weird rat with a pleasure button way like people running hate blogs or something… But I know my own head and that I can get bored of stuff so I marathon a lot of other shows and think about other things than fandom stuff as much as possible and just let this be the gutter my brain drains into when my attention span is too shot to hell to do anything else and I just want to slump over a keyboard and do the easiest activity I know bar playing Animal Crossing for hours. 

Other people with busier lives and actual jobs and energy and limbs that don’t just randomly stop working when they do anything for more than 5 minutes and so on might not be casual fans but they make a certain space in their life for fandom and get out of it what they need but it’s a high quality demand thing so if their carefully allocated me-time isn’t rewarding them like it should it’s totally their right to go find another OTP to amuse themselves with a fandom producing stuff they want to see and a media source that’s giving them what they want immediately and in a way they don’t have to “look for scraps” as some people were saying about Destiel in season 9, 10 and 11 while things were thinner on the ground.

And as one of the too-much-free-time fandom contributors, I’ve got an enormous luxury to stick out things people who don’t have time for being jerked around or over-analysing to find what they want to see have… Although I’ll try and pass on my thoughts for the people with less time to think them to try and help them enjoy themselves as much as possible :P Anyway I think a whole range of reasons happen that people might get fatigued of the show especially as lives change and people blogging enthusiastically one day might get a job or a new relationship or a dog or SOMETHING and just not spend quite so much time online and then discover they don’t NEED to spend so much time on fandom, and drift naturally… Then try and find some reason on the show they’ve stopped watching, but often it’s just that things look worse after time away when the spark has started to fade because it’s not being nurtured in the same way any more. 

And 12 years is a LONG ASS TIME to be invested in something, so I think in general the fatigue or changing interests is all over the place and we might see it more and more as people drift… People who might watch it all as a catch up one day maybe a year or two after the show ends, but just don’t have the patience to stay in fandom and put in that energy over and over and over. 

Also the show is in a really weird place where it has some of the best writers it’s ever had in Berens and the newbie writers, and Dabb’s doing some fascinating things with the plot, but Buckleming are the executors of the story, in several interpretations of that phrase :P And there are people who skip MotW and find them unimportant or would judge the season on the plot, not the heart of the story… It’s a pretty precarious place, quality-wise. I think season 11 and 12 are a proper like, silver age revival of the MotW (with Nancy Won and Robbie giving last season a massive boost) where I think those episodes are really innovative and interesting, and the writers are being allowed a lot of freedom to play on THOSE canvases, but while the character development and *reasons* for the story have been fascinating and important, obviously 5 of the plot episodes this latest season were Buckleming and crucial to watch to know wtf was going on, even though the writers of those episodes seem to have such a terrible problem with hating the audience (literally, it’s in their scripts and off-screen comments), the genre, second drafts, common human decency towards characters and understanding why they’re important, pacing, you name it… :P So the show literally has 2 faces these days and depending on which one you see when you think of season 12, probably defines how you feel about the show as a whole and all that. I treat the plot episodes these days as a necessary evil between episodes written by people who actually like the show and care about it and its characters (see also: my non-stop sobbing about 12x22 since it aired)… But seeing the other face can really cast a cloud over the show and I’ve seen it make people wonder why the other writers even try. (I mean Perez did an incredible salvage job on Crowley in 12x15 only for it to immediately get yanked away again the next time BL wrote him and I think only they really got to play with him for the rest of the season, meaning all that work to make it seem important and thematically relevant that Perez had set up in 12x12 and messed with in 12x15 ended up being for nothing and Dabb had no time to do anything deep with Crowley, because 12x13 turns out to be the big Crowley & Rowena farewell episode, except for how it flubbed the entire premise of Grand Send Off Episode a la 7x10 or something despite all the ingredients being there…)

I am just rambling now so… Gonna hit post. Hope this makes sense :P This is just my interpretation of how people are feeling/how fandom as an entity seems to work, so it’s pretty subjective and others might feel very differently especially people who have been in negative echo chambers while I’ve built myself a reasonably positive one plus SENSIBLE and CONSTRUCTIVE wanky criticism that doesn’t go off the deep end :P

[mittensmorgul]

Any thoughts on the differences between ghosts and demons, since Hell has been busted open but it's pretty much just ghosts topside (except Belphie). It can't just be time in Hell as the deciding factor - unless Jack the Ripper's been haunting people for awhile and just recently got his soul sent to Hell. Crowley's the only demon we really have a timeline for... I wonder if souls "choose", like Dean's "choice" to get off the rack and take up the knife when he was in Hell...

So... I don’t honestly have more than random guesses to go on here, but this is one of those cosmological things I tend to obsess over at 3 am, so I decided to take this directly to grey’s chattybubbles, and we had an interesting chat about it. I’ll just put it here because our rambling entertained me, and heck, maybe someone else has something to add...

Warnings for incredibly dubious math below the cut :’D

mittensmorgulI gotta say, your ask message is something I've been thinking about since last week, but jack the ripper's ghost has made it 100000x worse >.>I'm just gonna... ramble a bit in your general direction and see if we can come up with an answer either of us finds reasonable >.>Maybe it's a frogs and toads situation. All toads are frogs, but not all frogs are toads?i.e. all demons once were human souls, but not all human souls can or will become demons

mittensmorgulI don't know if it's their choice as to whether they become demons or not, or some other unrelated metaphysical process. But I've wondered this for a while about how crossroads demons develop red eyes while "regular demons" don't. So what makes a crossroads demon vs a run of the mill demon?

grey2510right

mittensmorgulI know it's not the same question, but it's in the same family of questions :'D

grey2510one of the things I was considering was what made them go to Hell in the first placelike someone who made a deal - for whatever reason - is someone who knows to look for loopholes and ways out of a shit situationand if your options are "be tortured" or "not be tortured"...

grey2510could also explain how crossroads demons are made... maybe the crossroads demons all made deals as humansit's a self perpetuating systemwhereas some psychopath serial killer would get sent to hell, but might not have the deal-making acumenif that makes any kind of sense

mittensmorgulI always had assumed that the torture was part of the process, and that happening in Hell was what turned a soul into a demon, you know? But if Hell is mostly just ghosts being tortured for their sins for eternity, rather than being tortured into demons within a relatively short span of time (one would think 140 earth years should do it...) maybe only some souls are even able to become demonsor there may be a specific process involved to turn them-- like witches who pledge themselves to a demon like RubyAnd Crowley, who made a deal and then ended up a crossroads demon

grey2510yeah

mittensmorgullike maybe there had to be a bit of something supernatural already staining the soul to make them eligible :'D

grey2510because we know it must have been a relatively short turn around for Crowley - in earth years, he died 300 years ago, but he was turned demon in enough time to know Naomi and refer to Mesopotamia (which doesn't sound modern) and to establish himself as King of the Crossroads

mittensmorgulBecause if it was just a matter of a choice, I don't think very many people would choose "torture" over "do this and you can become a demon which is bad but heck it's not torture"

grey2510yeahunless they truly believed they were guilty (but that's more of Lucifer the show's version of Hell)I don't have an answer but I thought Spiders George might have a few thoughtslol*georg

mittensmorgulyeah, and Crowley has STUDIED STUFF. I mean, he knows Enochian, knows all the major players, knows tons of unrelated lore and weapons and all sorts of stuff (including magic he presumably learned as a human)So he's been a demon (or at least not just some poor tortured soul in Hell) for a very, very long time to have been "King of the Crossroads" in a leadership position even at the beginning of the serieshe didn't spend 140 of those years languishing as a soul in Hell

grey2510yeahand he had it in with Lilith

mittensmorgulyeah, this is all just random thoughts, but I don't know if canon will ever make a statement on it one way or another.

grey2510I'd be surprised if they did

mittensmorguland Jack the Ripper was I believe Eugenie's pet Evil Thing in this episode, so I don't know that this wasn't just a random "I'm gonna use this because it sounds cool! Screw canon!" moment for her or what

grey2510especially since we have BL canon acrobatics

mittensmorgulyeah

grey2510yeah - I could really care less about Jack the Ripper but if that's her current chew toy, have fun

mittensmorgulI think Ketch is her current chew toy

grey2510well him too

mittensmorgulwhich I'll take over Lucifer or Nick any day:P

grey2510haha I was just about to say that

mittensmorgulbut yeah, as far as understanding the cosmology and metaphysics, if it's just BL canon I tend to ignore it as much as possible unless we get secondary confirmation of a thing from another writer

grey2510yeah - although we do have a little bit of outside of BL since it was introduced in 15x01but that could have just been the other writers tossing a shiny object to her

mittensmorgulwell the oldest of those other souls from hell that we saw was 15 earth years, the Woman in White.Which... I could buy she wouldn't have been "demonized" yet.

grey2510yeahalso - Lizzie Borden we don't know for sure because our Lizzie ep wasn't actually Lizzie right?

mittensmorgulShe was a deeply traumatized ghost for decades before being sent to Hell in 1.01yeah, it was a fake haunting, and Amara eating people's souls

grey2510rightbeen awhile since I've seen that season

mittensmorgulBut nothing in canon clarified if it was lizzie borden with the ax anyway, we just assume it was

grey2510truebut yeah - Constance still being a soul and not a demon makes sense

mittensmorgulAnd if it was, we don't know if that was scripted, or something someone thought would look cool and costumed that way

grey2510yeah

mittensmorgulBUT! I do think it's likely that most souls don't become demons, otherwise there would've been a heck of a lot more of them. And like we've been running out of angels, Hell was running low on demons by s13even by s11, after amara ate her way through a lot of them

grey2510trueit still does make you wonder what it is that makes some souls "special" enough to become demons

mittensmorgulI've always found it weird we don't really see a lot of "brand new demons"

grey2510....still waiting for Bela to show up and be like fuck all y'all

mittensmorgulBela should be queen of the crossroads. She made a deal, dealt with the supernatural, and deserved better.

grey2510seriouslyshe'd be the natural successor - she was pretty much the human equivalent before she got dragged away

mittensmorgulyep

grey2510i know this is also just early season weirdness, but there was never anything else about different types of demons like the shadowy things that Meg called

mittensmorgulthough I'm 99% sure the show can't afford Lauren Cohan, and I'm not sure they'd bring back Bela without her. Though as a demon she would by necessity be wearing a different meatsuit...

grey2510yeah - they could put her in anyone

mittensmorgulYeah, the Daevasand the Acheri demon we saw exactly once in 2.21 >..

grey2510or why wispy the pilot was doing his thingoh yeah that was the girl looking thing right?

mittensmorguland good old Specky from 1.04 with his airplane fetishyeah

grey2510i'm just going to assume that they were things that other hunters/lore called "demons" because they didn't have another name for them

mittensmorgulyeah

grey2510anyway, it would be fascinating to know what exactly the soul to demon process is all about

mittensmorgulbut human souls, twisted into demons, seems to happen by a very specific process. Like it must be done TO the soulit's probably all on the demon tablet >.>

grey2510haha probably

mittensmorgulbut they mentioned there were several BILLION souls in Hell, which seems... rather a lot... I just looked it up... about 55 million people die every year.

grey2510that's a lot of big numbers

mittensmorgulso about 20 years for a billion people to die

grey2510so not my area lol

mittensmorguland I assume the vast majority of them do not go to Hell

grey2510lol ok - i'm glad you did the math (i've been grading freshman papers all day so my brain is kinda fried)do you watch the Good Place?

mittensmorgulI mean if even Ken Lay gets into Heaven, then we have to assume the VAST majority of people who die won't go to Hell

grey2510yeah

mittensmorgulno I haven't seen it, but I've watched through tumblr :'D

grey2510the rules seem pretty laxah gotchai was going to make a reference to something that happened last season but didn't want to ruin it for you

mittensmorgulso if even 1/10 people who die end up in Hell, it would still take like 200 years for a billion souls to accumulate. Or 2000 years if only 1 /100 people go to Hell

grey2510so assume a few centuries to get a billion

mittensmorgul(and the death rate has not always been as high as it is now, with 8 billion people on the planet, compared to 2000 years ago, you know? so that's more math than I'm actually willing to do :P)

grey2510lolyeah spn's hell rules seem to be "made a deal" and "totally evil person"murders, rapists, etc.not much in the middle

mittensmorgulyeahbut the population of the earth even 200 years ago was less than 1/10 what it is today, so the death rate would've also dropped by that much, making it take that much longer for hell souls to accumulate.Point being, if there are that many SOULS in Hell, and not just demons, then apparently not every soul DOES become a demonand I REALLY NEED TO KNOW WHY NOW

grey2510haha

mittensmorgulGAH

grey2510it's been bugging me too, so i guess we can suffer together

mittensmorgulokay, I really wanna copy/paste this as the reply to your message, because I feel like my non-answer is a good answer

grey2510fine by me

mittensmorguland maybe we can have other people pitch in ideas :PI'm pretty sure this is the sort of thing Canon will never explain in detail, but it's exactly the sort of thing I personally wonder about the most.

grey2510so where did we land? something done specifically to the soul that turns them, but then also the question of whether there's something about the soul that makes them a viable candidate for the transformation?

mittensmorgulyeah, that's succinct. :'D

grey2510and then if crossroads demons are former deal makers

mittensmorgulalso if they've made a deal either with a crossroads demon, or as a "borrower witch," as they've been called by other witches in canon

grey2510or something else about them that determines what kind of demon they'll be come*become

mittensmorgulyeah

[mittensmorgul]

Hi! Since we found out that Chuck is pulling the strings in the finale over just about everything how do you think it happened that his “storytelling” led him to the Amara storyline in s11? Bc she is pretty equal to him in power & a threat so it seems weird that he led the boys to a battle with her? Or do you think he just didn’t expect the boys to free Dean of the mark in s10 and free her so he genuinely had to step in to clean up the mess? Or am I just doing unnecessary mental gymnastics here?

Hi hi! I’ve been doing mental gymnastics over all of this for years already... I mean even back when Chuck was “just a prophet.” Because I think one thing that happened all the way back in 14.18 is critical to understanding the extent (and limitations) of Chuck’s power:

CHUCK: What are you doing here? I didn't write this.DEAN: (manhandling him) Come on. I need you to come with me.CHUCK: What? Where?DEAN: To the motel where Sam is.CHUCK: That's where Lilith is.DEAN: Yeah, exactly. I need you to stop her.CHUCK: Are you insane? Lilith? I know what she's capable of, Dean. I wrote her.DEAN: All right, listen to me. You have an archangel tethered to you, okay? All you got to do is show up and boom! Lilith gets smoked.CHUCK: But I-I haven't seen that yet. Th-the story –DEAN: Chuck, you're the only shot that I've got left.CHUCK: But... I'm just a writer.DEAN: This isn't a story anymore, man. This is real! And you're in it! Now, I need you to get off your ass and fight. Come on, Chuck.CHUCK: No friggin' way.DEAN: Okay, well, then, how about this – I've got a gun in my pocket, and if you don't come with me, I'll blow your brains out.CHUCK: I thought you said I was protected by an archangel.DEAN: Well, interesting exercise. Let's see who the quicker draw is.

After spending the episode demonstrating the level of detail Chuck was capable of writing (down to the exact details of what they were each thinking during the laundromat scene), while also only “kinda guesstimating Nostradamus-vague-style” on other things (such as “The Red Motel” and Dean “seeing stars” that turned out to be a woman’s dangly earrings, as well as Dean eating a burger that had been handed to him by accident and not what he ordered), to vague details that only made sense AFTER the fact but could easily have described something entirely different depending on how Sam and Dean chose to interpret them (like Dean driving around town with plastic in his smashed out plastic window... regardless of where he’d parked Baby that could’ve happened one way or another, you know? a tree branch could’ve fallen on it in the Red Motel parking lot, a meteorite could’ve crashed through it pretty much anywhere, so if Chuck really wanted that to happen, Dean’s choices would’ve been irrelevant, because none of the other details were actually written down, you know?). well that sentence went on way too long and never actually went anywhere... heck let’s try again...

Chuck seemed genuinely surprised when Dean came in and demanded his help. Like this was the moment he was waiting for, for “his characters” to push back. To surprise him. Almost as if he was testing their ability to “go off script,” as it were... I’ve written some about this recently, actually:

https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/185718852655/418-the-monster-at-the-end-of-this-book-ironic

and from a slightly different angle:

https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/186962723225/i-just-read-your-posts-about-azazelluciferthe

and re: 4.22 https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/185754144990/422-lucifer-rising-kinda-says-it-all-right

more about 11.20: https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/184761977310/i-just-recently-finished-rewatching-s14-all-the

https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/184692097460/greetings-from-1120-on-the-tnt-loop-which-weve

https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/184554679280/im-finally-up-to-s11-on-the-tnt-loop-yay-and

https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/184533231910/remember-that-time-dean-saw-through-the-story-to

https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/184515495675/i-dont-know-if-anyone-has-mentioned-this-yet-but

I know I’ve written more on this, which you can probably find in my episode tags for the end-run of s11, related to my most recent rewatch post 14.20. But this is a good start, probably.

My takeaway? Chuck does have a lot of power, but a lot of limitations on how exactly he uses them. Just like Billie and her “hands off” policy that she occasionally bends (or breaks outright) while mostly working within her “rules” and doing her best to nudge or drop hints to steer the story anyway.

Regarding Chuck’s involvement in Amara’s release? I don’t think that was something he orchestrated specifically, but it was something that had been inevitable anyway since he’d originally locked her up with the Mark, you know? The Mark had existed, and the results of it existing in the universe were that eventually it would be unlocked one way or another. I think it’s more a factor of “he always knew it would be undone and Amara would be released someday” but the specifics of when and how were not necessarily orchestrated directly by him.

I hope that makes sense...

But actions have consequences. Sometimes they’re cosmic. Sometimes they’re poetic. Even Chuck’s story is subject to the laws of the universe he created, and I think he doesn’t even really know what the cosmic ripples will bring when he tosses another stone in the narrative lake, you know? I think that’s a big part of what makes the whole thing so interesting to him, what makes Sam and Dean his “favorite characters.” Because they do so often surprise him.

[mittensmorgul]

I'm late to the game and missed out on years of meta since this is my first season watching live. What were you expecting to happen at the end of season 10? Some of your posts recently mentioned about MoC Dean and the dark parts of himself vs darkness being forced upon him (or something like that). You don't have to write out a big long thing if you're not in the mood, but what tag should i search on your blog to read more about this? No rush on the reply, I just love your meta! Thanks!

Hi there! And Heck. Thanks! :D

I could’ve sworn I had a tag for this spec, but in the Great Tumblr Tag Breaking Disaster of 2k16, I sorta... lost most of my tags.

I have been sitting here trolling through my ancient posts (heh, 2015... ancient)

From the midseason 10 hellatus:

http://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/105381976230/the-mark-of-cain-deans-salvation-cass-grace

From toward the end of s11:

http://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/144685272700/i-never-liked-the-grace-cure-idea-mostly-because

I mean there was a lot of foreshadowing all through the first half of s10 about the mark being a curse, making it about some sort of struggle internal to Dean

The episode I specifically thought was a small version of the finale we expected was 10.11. It ended up being the key to s11 instead, and not applying to Dean himself, but Chuck and Amara...

http://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/tagged/spn%2010.11

But all the buildup in the first half of s10 of the Mark being “Dean’s Darkness,” and then suddenly all the parallels after 10.14 are framing it as something more akin to possession...

I really wish I’d a) had a better tagging system back in s10, and b) not had my tags self-destruct last year...

But I’ll just say follow any links in some of those tags and posts above, and you’ll probably find far more on the whole soul-grace cure theory for the mark... (which evolved into the grand unification via love theory that explained s11-- and Chuck and Amara’s resolution-- instead of s10, and Dean’s cure...

In case you didn’t see all my posts on the subject from last week, I think most of them landed in this tag:

mittens makes peace with s10 via dabb's spitewriting of s12: an ongoing saga